Exploitation or Exclusion?

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper demonstrates that, although exploitation is central to Marxian theory, the Marxian conception of exploitation has serious limitations. The paper shows that the appropriation of productive labour is best viewed as only one of the possible consequences of the more general process of exclusion in the Weberian sense. It argues that Weberian closure theory begins with a broader conception, exclusion, which captures the common and essential feature of forms of domination which on the surface appear quite different, and it demonstrates that closure theory provides the basis for the development of a power theory of prices and profits as an alternative to the restricted Marxian conception of exploitation and associated labour theory of value.

This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit: